If i where in your shoes i would forget about XQuartz and do the thing in AppleScript.

I'm aware that some fellow monks consider this as crap and totally inferior :-( but i don't mind...

OK, and this isn't what you wanted (a rewrite of your app) but IMHO this is the best approach.

Your app will look good (Mac like) and it's quite easy to handle the return values of your Perl stuff in AppleScript

Writing an comfortable installer that resolves the XQuartz dependencies would IMHO be a bigger challenge.

Please see also:

• A very trivial example
• AppleScript
• AppleScript Shell Programming
• AppleScript Overview

Regards, Karl